Germany: Memories of a Nation (Radio 4) | iPlayer
21st-Century Mythologies (Radio 4) | iPlayer
My favourite Radio 4 format is the 15-minute documentary serial: all the info, none of the faff, perfect for download/podcast listening. Of course, Neil McGregor, director of the British Museum, gave us the daddy of all these series with his 2010 masterwork, A History of the World in 100 Objects. (Some stats: more than 4 million regular listeners and more than 10 million podcast subscribers, about half of whom are from outside the UK. And, because the programmes are still available, those numbers are rising.) He revisited his successful format, an object that opens up a subject, for Shakespeare’s Restless World in 2012. And now he’s back again with Germany: Memories of a Nation.
Crikey, McGregor is formidable. So much knowledge: of history and art and politics and geography and religion. Of everything. He is the don of donnishness, giving us mini-lectures packed with memorable images, with pertinent facts and dates; but also expert commentators who take established opinion to task. It’s amazing how much he gets in, and when I’m feeling slow I can find McGregor’s programmes impenetrably dense. You can’t let your mind wander off to what you’re having for tea; two minutes’ loss of concentration and you’ll have missed something vital. Plus, if you didn’t do history O-level, which I didn’t, his assumption of your familiarity with important events, such as the Reformation, can make you wail.
But you know, that’s what Google is for, and it is always far, far better to have a presenter assume that you know stuff than assume that you don’t. I like programmes that say “Keep up!” rather than “Shall we go over that again?” And Germany: Memories of a Nation has already made me understand Germany far better than I did before – I now have a grasp of how Germany as a nation is actually a collection of small, independently minded city-states. I understand the significance of Charlemagne (or Karl der Gross) to both France and Germany; and how German manufacturing has long been associated with quality. And, crucially, I can remember this information because McGregor has rooted it in actual things: in beer and sausages, in Charlemagne’s crown, in a Holbein portrait of a German merchant who lived in London in the 1530s.
The only thing that McGregor’s programmes lack sometimes is a tweak of cheek or humour. Luckily, on the Holbein programme, which was about Hansa, a pan-Europe alliance of trading cities that lasted from the 13th century to the 19th, Hilary Mantel popped up to give her take. Mantel’s way with words really helped. She pointed out that the Holbein portrait was very likely to have been altered for the subject’s prospective bride (to show “this is what I look like on the eve of our marriage”), and was, she said, “a mug shot done by a genius”.
Another great white academic taking advantage of Radio 4’s 15-minute approach is Peter Conrad, who is busy doing a rethink of Roland Barthes’s seminal Mythologies in his own 21st-Century Mythologies. I like these programmes, though after a McGregor binge their discursiveness can seem almost lightweight, which is ridiculous. This is Peter Conrad we’re talking about. Anyhow, Conrad has taken our young century’s embarrassment of lightweight subjects – the selfie, the Kardashians, e-cigarettes – and put them up to merciless scrutiny.
Conrad ponders whether or not his chosen subjects have become contemporary myths, and with some he seems to believe they have. His ruminations on the e-cigarette were very Barthesian: Barthes himself spent time considering the “real” cigarette. Conrad concluded that, for all the commercial attempts to make vaping clean, modern, unthreatening, it is still rooted in “residue”, in “embers and ash”, because myths, according to Barthes, often settle for a “degraded survival”. Instead of passing away into obscurity, as cigarettes appeared to be doing, they have continued, but only in a warped, dying facsimile of their original selves.
These programmes are, again, a little tough if you’re feeling stupid. But there is also a lot of tinder-dry humour. The disdain with which Conrad presented his description of Kim Kardashian’s belfie (her “leotard” snicked by her “bodily ravines”) could not fail to be clocked by the slowest of brains. And it certainly made me laugh.
